Practical, appropriate, empirically-validated guidelines for designing educational games

There has recently been a great deal of interest in the potential of computer games to function as innovative educational tools. However, there is very little evidence of games fulfilling that potential. Indeed, the process of merging the disparate goals of education and games design appears problematic, and there are currently no practical guidelines for how to do so in a coherent manner. In this paper, we describe the successful, empirically validated teaching methods developed by behavioural psychologists and point out how they are uniquely suited to take advantage of the benefits that games offer to education. We conclude by proposing some practical steps for designing educational games, based on the techniques of Applied Behaviour Analysis. It is intended that this paper can both focus educational games designers on the features of games that are genuinely useful for education, and also introduce a successful form of teaching that this audience may not yet be familiar with

Vuorovaikutteinen visualisointitekniikka biosignaalin analysointiin

Sydänsairauksista saadaan lisätietoa tutkimalla sydänsolujen kalsiumsignaalin häiriöitä. Tässä tutkielmassa esitellään kalsiumsignaalien analysointiin kehitetty sovellus, joka pohjautuu visuaalisen analytiikan keinoihin. Sovellus toimii selaimessa, ja se perustuu laskennalliseen analyysiin, jonka tulokset visualisoidaan. Laskennan parametrien muutokset heijastuvat reaaliaikaisesti visualisointiin. Lisäksi sovellus mahdollistaa lääkevasteiden analysoinnin ja vertailun

Human Motion Analysis and Synthesis in Computer Graphics

This thesis focuses on solving a challenging problem in the field of computer graphics, namely to model and understand 3D human motion efficiently and meaningfully. This is vital to achieve the analysis (health & sports science), synthesis (character animation) and control (video game) of human movements. Though numerous studies have focused on improving the results of motion analysis, motion synthesis and motion control, only a few of these studies solved the problems from the fundamental part owing to the lack of information encoded in motion data. In my works, the motion of human was divided into the three types, namely single human motion, multi-people interactions and crowd movement. Subsequently, I solved the problems from motion analysis to motion control in different types of motion. In the single human motion, two types of motion graphs on the motion sequence were proposed using Markov Process. The human motion is represented as the directed graphs, which suggests the number of action patterns and transitions among them. By analyzing the graphs topologies, the richness, transitions flexibility and unpredictability among different action patterns inside the human motion sequence can be easily verified. The framework here is capable of visualizing and analyzing the human motion on the high level of action preference, intention and diversity. For the two people interaction motion, the use of 3D volumetric meshes on the interacting people was proposed to model their movement and spatial relationship among them. The semantic meanings of the motions were defined by such relationship. A customized Earth Movers Distance was proposed to assess the topological and geometric difference between two groups of meshes. The above assessment captured the semantic similarities among different two-people interactions, which is consistent with what humans perceive. With this interaction motion representation, the multi-people interactions in semantic level can be retrieved and analyzed, and such complex movements can be easily adapted and synthesized with low computational costs. In the crowd movement, a data-driven gesture-based crowd control system was proposed, in which the control scheme was learned from example gestures provided by different users. The users gestures and corresponding crowd motions, representable to the crowd motions properties and irrelevant to style variations of gestures and crowd motions, were modelled into a compact low dimensional space. With this representation, the proposed framework can take an arbitrary users input gesture and generate appropriate crowd motion in real time. This thesis shows the advantages of higher-level human motion modelling in different scenarios and solves different challenging tasks of computer graphics. The unified framework summarizes the knowledge to analyze, synthesize and control the movement of human

Touching transport - a case study on visualizing metropolitan public transit on interactive tabletops

Due to recent technical developments, urban systems generate large and complex data sets. While visualizations have been used to make these accessible, often they are tailored to one specific group of users, typically the public or expert users. We present Touching Transport, an application that allows a diverse group of users to visually explore public transit data on a multi-touch tabletop. It provides multiple perspectives of the data and consists of three visualization modes conveying tempo-spatial patterns as map, time-series, and arc view. We exhibited our system publicly, and evaluated it in a lab study with three distinct user groups: citizens with knowledge of the local environment, experts in the domain of public transport, and non-experts with neither lo- cal nor domain knowledge. Our observations and evaluation results show we achieved our goals of both attracting visitors to explore the data while enabling gathering insights for both citizens and experts. We discuss the design considerations in developing our system, and describe our lessons learned in designing engaging tabletop visualizations.status: publishe